Books by Saidiya Hartman
“Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, published in 2019, doesn’t couch itself as a book about the Harlem Renaissance. The words ‘Harlem’ and ‘Renaissance’ appear as a pair exactly once in its 441 pages, and it’s been far better recognized for the power of Hartman’s fictional-historical ‘critical fabulation’ than as a rival to When Harlem Was in Vogue. But this intimate feminist record of ‘social upheaval’ still strikes me as the most significant recent work of Harlem Renaissance scholarship. Hartman’s cast of freebooting Black women, rescued from the condescension of posterity through a blend of archival sleuthing and imaginative storytelling, are New Negroes before the fact…Wayward Lives approaches Harlem Renaissance history from the boulevard up, and addresses the question of what the 90 per cent of Black New Yorkers mostly unnoticed by Lewis and company were doing as Harlem prepared for faddishness.” Read more...
The best books on The Harlem Renaissance
William J. Maxwell, Literary Scholar
Interviews where books by Saidiya Hartman were recommended
The best books on The Harlem Renaissance, recommended by William J. Maxwell
It was a golden age for American culture, a flourishing of Black literature, music and the arts that exploded in the 1910s and lasted through to the Great Depression. It was focused on Harlem, the area of New York City above Central Park, but its origins and its impact were much, much broader. William J. Maxwell, Professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, recommends some of the best books on the Harlem Renaissance.
